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Rubio’s infamous water moment

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The orchestra pit metaphor comes from Roger Ailes. I interviewed him years ago when he was George H.W. Bush’s media wizard and not yet head of the Fox News Channel.

The 1988 Bush-Michael Dukakis presidential race had been marked by extremely negative campaigning. Ailes claimed this was largely the fault of the press and its obsession with the negative.

“A guy plays a wonderful symphony and at the end he falls in the orchestra pit,” Ailes said. “Him falling in the pit will be the story.”

“The press is part of the negative process they attack,” he went on. “Is Ailes negative? Go read the headlines and you’ll see who’s really negative. I knew I could always get a headline if I went negative.”

Nobody pushed Marco Rubio — he stumbled on his own — but soon he was looking up from the bottom of the pit.

Rubio, a senator from Florida, gave the official Republican response to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address on Tuesday. Even though Rubio is only 41 and relatively new to the national stage, he did just fine. For 11 minutes. And then he got thirsty.

Rubio was speaking live from a room at the U.S. Capitol, when he developed a dry mouth. He could have done the human thing, which would have been to stop his speech and say, “Excuse me, I need some water.”

But the human thing is not what comes to mind when one is doing live TV. On live TV, one wants to do the smoothest thing one can.